Embrace the Power of You: Owning Your Identity at Work

By Tricia Montalvo Timm

“An inspiring story of embracing one’s true self, with practical advice”
Publishers Weekly, BookLife Review (Editor’s Pick)
*****
Embrace the Power of You
In the competitive world of Silicon Valley, corporate lawyer Tricia Montalvo Timm knew that talent and drive weren’t enough to succeed. She had to belong. Timm took a cue from her days as a child actor, when she had to change her name to get auditions. As an adult, she downplayed her Latino heritage and her life as a mother to fit in. But after two decades of hiding and feeling exhausted and frustrated, she realized that to truly belong she needed to accept herself first. It worked. After showing up at work as her authentic self, her career soared. At the height of her success, she led the sale of software company Looker to Google for $2.6 billion.
If you’ve ever hidden your real self to belong, Embrace the Power of You will resonate. Timm’s journey toward self-acceptance provides a wealth of insight into the reasons why people feel alienated and invisible in the workplace. Timm knows firsthand the fear and shame that comes from hiding your identity, and shows how to overcome those feelings one small step at a time. Through her own story and those of other top executives, she offers powerful strategies and simple tools on how you too can show up as your authentic self at work.
If you’ve ever hidden your identity to fit in, this book will set you on the path to succeed at levels higher than you ever thought possible. A singular book from one of the only Latinas to have attained the triple achievements of reaching the C-Suite, joining the boardroom and cracking the venture capital ceiling, Embrace the Power of You is a warm and courageous guide to finding success through choosing your authentic self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tricia Montalvo Timm
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781774582589

Tricia Montalvo Timm

Tricia Montalvo Timm is a first-generation Latina executive, board director, venture investor and speaker. She rose through the ranks of Silicon Valley advising high-tech companies both big and small, culminating in the sale of data analytics software company Looker to Google for $2.6 billion. In her twenty-five-year career, she has worked with start-ups and publicly traded multinationals alike. Timm was awarded the 2020 Women of Influence Award and the Latino Business Leadership Award Silicon Valley Business Journal and was named Diversity Champion by the SVBJ Corporate Counsel Awards. She is on a mission to inspire anyone who has ever felt like an “other” in the workplace to embrace their true self, own their identity and achieve success and fulfillment in their life and career.

Book preview

1

Who Is the Real You?

My heart is racing so fast that I’m sure everyone around me can see it beating out of my body.

I practice my relaxation techniques. Close my eyes. Slowly take three deep breaths.

I enter the stairwell on my way to the conference room where I am about to deliver my story to the whole company. The talk had actually been my own idea but, in this moment, I regret suggesting it.

Alone in the stairwell, I stop and pause. Another deep breath.

I remember a quote from the poet Maya Angelou: I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.

You may feel alone, I remind myself, but you stand as ten thousand.

I arrive in the conference room and watch our employees gather. I smile. You know that fake smile, like everything is totally okay and that you’ve got this? I’m the general counsel of a hot Silicon Valley tech company for God’s sake. Why wouldn’t I have this?

The clock inches toward the top of the hour. Time for me to start. The CEO takes a seat in the front row. I glance at him. He gives me a slight nod and a smile and I breathe a little bit easier.

I begin.

---

The road to that moment was not easy. It was during National Hispanic Heritage Month at Looker, a data analytics software company in Santa Cruz, California. This is where I told my story for the first time.

My parents are both immigrants to this country. They met in Los Angeles and worked several jobs to make a life for themselves. For them, success was defined by providing their children with a better life and a good education.

When I was born, we lived in a predominantly Latino community in Los Angeles. My parents managed an apartment building, which allowed them to live rent-free and gave them a chance to save up for a house. When my sister and I were about to start elementary school, they wanted us to have the opportunity to get a better education, so they moved us out of the city and into the suburbs, and enrolled us in a local Catholic school.

My mom used to say to me, They can always take away your things, but they can never take away your education. I am not sure who they were in this advice, but it was something that was drilled into my head every day. Education would be my ticket to the American dream.

My school was predominantly white with very few Latinos and even fewer Black students. All of our teachers and coaches were white, and I quickly realized that my family was different. My parents had thick Spanish accents. We had relatives in faraway countries and our traditions and celebrations were different from those of my classmates. Even at that young age, I picked up on these differences.

As I started every new chapter of my life, I kept conformity as my guiding principle. I was usually the only person of color in the room and many times the only woman. The skills I learned in grade school to keep from standing out, such as adapting my clothes and hairstyle to the accepted fashion or laughing or staying silent at uncomfortable remarks, served me well in my professional world.

I had the routine down cold: walk into a room, scan it and then adapt. I call this the Scan-Evaluate-Adapt process.

How many women are in the room?

Are there any people of color here?

Am I the youngest or oldest person?

These were all very important questions as I figured out how to show up in gatherings or approach conversations. Most of the time I instinctively knew that I could not show up as the loud Latina girl who liked to share her opinion confidently.

I quickly figured out which persona needed to be present in any given situation. What sport do I need to be able to talk about? What hobbies should I be interested in? Do I like red or white wine? If red, is it a cab or pinot? In order for me to fit into the traditional corporate setting, I needed to have shared likes and experiences with those around me. Talking about tamales, sangria and mariachis would simply not cut it. Not if I wanted to advance.

I learned to assimilate to my environment as a result of my experience of being the only. Either the only woman, the only Latino or the only working mom. If you have ever felt like the only of something or like an other in the room, you know how lonely it feels. So, instead of standing out and having the spotlight on your otherness, you have likely gone through the experience of downplaying or hiding that piece of your identity that you believe may not be welcomed in a given situation.

The most common identities we think about are race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. But anybody can be an other. It can be the single mom who struggles to keep it all together at home but pretends to be totally fine. It can be the executive with a learning disability who doesn’t want others to know that reading or spelling is hard for him. Or it can be a manager who battles anxiety and depression but doesn’t want to ask for time off for fear that her team may think she can’t handle the workload. Many of us worry that, if we showed our true self, we would not be accepted. All of these fears are real and often push us toward hiding those parts of our identity.

I Feel Like an Outsider

Mastering the skill of hiding took time, but I got a crash course during my first job out of law school. I started my career at one of the largest and most elite corporate law firms in the country. This was a traditional firm that had large corner offices, mahogany desks, tall tinted windows and boardrooms with whiteboards and conference phones. The firm represented some of the oldest companies in the country, such as institutional banks that backed hot Silicon Valley start-ups. I was incredibly fortunate to have launched my career at a law firm with such a distinct reputation and a long list of brand-name clients.

As I started my first week in the fall of 1996, the firm distributed an announcement that listed all of the new first-year associates. It included our names, a photo and the law school that each of us attended. As I scrolled through each page, I read the school names out loud: Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, Cornell. How did I end up among this elite group of associates? I wondered. As I continued to scroll, I also noticed that I was the only Latina. While I knew on an intellectual level that a firm like this one would not hire me out of pity, it sure felt like I somehow landed the position by accident. I think that this is where my imposter syndrome started. But I kept my head down, embraced the opportunity and decided to work hard to prove that I belonged among this group of incredibly talented first-year associates.

The law firm was made up of mostly older white men. Everybody was welcoming and, in fact, my first manager was a wonderful man who taught me how to be an exceptional lawyer. But his life was nothing like mine, so it was hard to form a meaningful relationship with him other than that of manager/employee. This was the case with most of the partners I worked with.

And while I certainly did face moments of bias and exclusion, that is not what was really hard. It was more the absence of anyone like me that quietly made me feel like an outsider. Only a handful of women were senior leaders or partners at the firm, and we never heard about their families or their struggles to balance it all. I only remember one Latino who was a senior associate, and I always wondered if we had similar life stories.

My existence as a young Latina lawyer was very lonely. I had to forge ahead on my own. I had to figure out the rules of the game without any guidance.

While I soon mastered the skill of fitting in and looking like I belonged in the room, I never felt like I belonged. When you don’t see anyone in the room who looks like you, then you don’t feel like you belong. Everybody else seems to be able to share the same jokes, the same childhood memories, the same opinions, the same taste in food, but yours is different. So, you stay quiet, smile and go along with it. It seemed relatively simple and really the only way to navigate this new world.

Everyone Seems Like They Belong Here, Except Me

As I progressed through that first year at the law firm, I looked for things that felt or sounded familiar, but there was not much I could relate to. I was not an avid golfer. I did not have a love for sushi or shrimp. I did not enjoy wearing suits. In fact, the only time I felt truly comfortable in that building was at night, when I could put my hair up in a ponytail, kick off my heels and enjoy my nightly chat with the janitor.

As a first-year associate at a large corporate law firm, you pretty much work all the time. Back in the 1990s, we did not bring computers home so we would just stay at the firm late into the evening. For me, that was usually around 11 p.m. A funny thing happens at night at a law firm. As the clock gets to 6 p.m., the staff and partners begin to shuffle home to their families. The phones and fax machines stop ringing and the hustle and bustle of the day starts to slowly dissipate. And, suddenly, it becomes quiet. Generally, the only people left in the office are the first- and second-year associates trying to make sense of the crazy day that just finished. Every evening during my first year, we would all slowly emerge from our offices like toddlers peeking their heads out of their bedrooms after lights out—often, simply looking for someone to commiserate with.

Little by little, people trickled home, but I did not. I was usually the one that stayed at the office the latest. I was determined to make it as a lawyer no matter how hard it was. I learned this work ethic from my parents. Every evening I would enjoy a small moment around 9 p.m., when the janitorial crew would come by. Often, it was one particular older Latino gentleman who would come into my office to clean out my garbage can. I remember smiling and saying hello to him in Spanish every night.

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás esta noche?

I remember the first time I said hello to him. He looked surprised that I spoke to him, especially in Spanish. I’m not sure many, if any, of the associates ever really talked to him, but I did. We would chat for a moment; he would empty my wastebasket and then go on to the next office. There was something familiar about his voice and his mannerisms that made my body relax and feel at ease.

I would often think about his family, since his shift started so late in the evening. I wondered whether he had children and whether he had to leave them behind to go to work at night. My dad also worked evenings when I was growing up, so he reminded me so much of him. I admired this man for his work ethic and for doing a job that most did not want. I liked acknowledging him and thanking him every night for keeping our offices clean.

Looking back, I felt more comfortable talking with the cleaning crew than I did talking with the law firm partners. Because of moments like these, I came to believe that I was not worthy enough to be an associate at this prestigious firm. When you don’t see or relate to anyone else in the room, you soon assume that everyone else belongs there except you.

Self-Reflection Moment

Take a look at your workplace environment. Who do you see in leadership positions?

Who do you feel most comfortable interacting with at work? Is it a colleague who has a similar lived experience as you? Is it with the support or service staff? Or is it a member of the leadership team? Notice when you are most comfortable being your true self.

If there is no setting at work where you feel comfortable, that is okay as well. At this point, it is just data about you and your work environment.

Hiding My Identity Makes Me Feel Lonely

It wasn’t too hard for me to hide my ethnic identity. As a lighter-skinned Latina, I could often pass as white. It was even easier after I got married and went from Patricia Montalvo to Tricia Timm.

I held the belief that if I hid or downplayed my ethnicity I would progress in the workplace. I was surprised to learn that I was not alone in feeling this way. According to a study by the think tank Coqual, 76 percent of Latinos expend energy on repressing parts of their personas in the workplace. They cover or downplay who they are, and modify their appearance, their body language, their communication style and their leadership presence.

Another unfortunate consequence of hiding is that others around you are uninhibited about what they say. I sat in silence more times than I care to admit as people around me made jokes about my ethnic background without knowing they were talking about me. A little bit of my sense of self-worth was lost every time a classmate would say a derogatory remark about Latinos, a co-worker expressed frustration about diversity efforts in the workplace or a soccer mom complained about the injustice of affirmative action in the college application process. All of these societal and cultural moments kept reinforcing the message to me that I was somehow lesser than those around me.

Despite all the success I had earned with my hard work and perseverance, I did not feel entitled to it. As a member of an underrepresented group, I internalized the belief that I somehow got an unfair advantage because of affirmative action programs or diversity mandates. And as this belief worked its way inside me, I came to question whether I deserved all my success, despite my hard work. I started to wonder if I had genuinely earned everything I had achieved, and if I belonged in the room after all. This led to self-doubt and my need to prove myself at all costs.

The weight of hiding who you are is heavy. You can lug it around for a long time, but after a while the loneliness and shame start to overshadow your everyday life. It took me two decades to realize this.

Trying to prove my worth meant setting unrealistic expectations of myself. I went through each stage of life like a checklist. Head down, keep up the pretense and don’t rock the boat. I kept going and never looked up.

 Graduate high school

 Graduate college

 Graduate law school

 Join big law firm

 Get married

 Have kids

 Become general counsel

On paper, this looked like success. But these checkmarks do not show all the bumps, bruises and tears it took to get there.

I want to pause here and acknowledge the tremendous privilege I’ve had in my life. I had two parents who decided to stay married and raise their kids together. They intentionally moved us into a middle-class neighborhood so that I could have a sense of safety. They worked multiple jobs to give me a first-class education, which ultimately led me to college and law school. While we certainly had our own challenges, I am keenly aware that not everyone gets these opportunities. Some of you may have grown up in the foster care system. Some of you may have been raised in a low-income community and as a result experienced higher levels of violence, lacked access to affordable health care or attended under-resourced schools. Some of you may have grown up in wealthy homes and what appeared to be the perfect family but, behind closed doors, family members battled with mental health conditions or addiction. Some of you may have been a child of divorced parents. I recognize that the playing field is not level and some of us started ahead of others. But, as I will explain later in this book, no matter what obstacle or boulder was put in front of you, overcoming that challenge and wanting a better life for yourself has created a resilience in you that you don’t even know you have. Stick with me on this journey, because I know that you too can get to a place where you will lovingly embrace who you are and where you came from, and realize that your unique perspective adds tremendous value and is exactly what is needed in the world right now.

Beginning with Self-Acceptance

After twenty years I had completed all of the items on my life checklist. I had overcome all odds to get there. The number of Latinas who attend a four-year university is small to begin with. If you take that group and track how many go to law school, that number gets even smaller. Few pass the bar and hardly any join a corporate law firm. If you, like me, beat all odds and join a corporate law firm or in-house legal department, once you get there, there is no one that looks like you or few that sponsor you. But for me, instead of feeling proud of all my achievements, I was lost. I had spent my whole life seeking everyone else’s acceptance but my own. During school I had changed my appearance and style to look like the other students. As an attorney, I adapted my social likes and dislikes to integrate with the corporate culture around me. As a working parent, I pretended not to be devoted to my children while at work, and on the soccer field I pretended not to be an accomplished lawyer. All the time, I feared being judged by everyone around me, and I spent all my energy trying to maintain each different facade. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, but I didn’t understand why.

As I was starting to work on improving my own sense of self, I discovered the work of Brené Brown and read this quote in her book The Gifts of Imperfection: Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

It was like one of Oprah Winfrey’s ah-ha moments. As soon as I read that definition, I realized that I was thinking about belonging in the wrong way. I recognized that, in order for me to belong in any room, I must first begin with accepting and loving who I am. For my entire life, I had kept wanting approval from others to validate my worth. I would say things like:

If they just listened to me.

If they just invited me to that event.

If they just included me in that conversation or asked for my opinion.

Then they would see who I really was and the value I bring. I wanted people around me to invite me into the room. When those invitations did not come, I began to doubt myself. The journey to believing that my authentic self was good enough was a long one. In fact, I would say that it never ends for some of us. Whenever I try something new, all of the doubts and fears come rushing back and I have to remind myself of all the lessons and tools that I will describe throughout this book. I need this book as much as you do.

The exact moment I decided to make a change in my life came on a random day, out of nowhere. I knew that keeping up the disguise of a fully put-together mom, lawyer, spouse, sibling, parent and daughter was too much, but it all came to a crashing halt one evening on a drive home.

I don’t even recall where I was coming from, but I remember that my husband had committed us to another dinner party at our house that evening and I had to get home to be the dutiful wife and host. I turned the corner to enter our neighborhood and caught sight of my friend Gina’s house. At the time, she had just begun work as a conscious leadership coach. She had taught me some techniques that gave me permission to express emotions, including the ugly ones such as anger and sadness that I would normally keep suppressed.

In an instant, instead of turning the corner and heading to my house and the dinner party that awaited me, I slammed on the brakes and swung into her driveway. I walked up to her front door and knocked, not knowing if she was home.

Hi, Tricia, she said. What’s up?

Are you home alone? I asked her.

She responded that she was.

Can I come in, please? Dinner guests are arriving at my house right now and I just can’t do it. I can’t keep all this up anymore.

Nothing about this dinner party was particularly overwhelming. In fact, it was a casual BBQ and my husband was taking care of most of it. But it was the culmination of decades of doing what I was supposed to do rather than what I wanted to do that caught up to me in that moment. I felt like I was a volcano and that magma had been building up over a lifetime and the pressure was too strong now to keep